Right, complete with 2,000 pair of shoes! Good article, and here's another....Gore Scrounges for Florida Votes
12/18/2000
Washington's Week
Gore Scrounges for Florida Votes
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By Jennifer G. Hickey
hickey@insightmag.com
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The Gore campaign was well-prepared beforehand for a vote recount in Florida and immediately put into play its no-holds-barred strategy to spin the vote total around in Gore’s favor.
As this is written, we do not know who will be the next president,” the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal declared on Nov. 9, 1960, as the nation awaited results in the presidential contest between Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. The closeness of that 1960 race and the undeniable fraud were followed by the manly response of Nixon. What a far cry that was from the lachrymose Chinese opera now surrounding Al Gore and George W. Bush as history no longer is being repeated but reshaped.
Despite allegations of Democratic election fraud, particularly in Texas and Chicago, where former senator Lyndon Johnson and the family of former mayor Richard J. Daley were past masters at political pilfering, the Nixon campaign surmised that legal challenges would, in the end, be fruitless. The Gore campaign saw the landscape differently. In fact, it produced a “Chad”-aquiddick drama that has cast a cloud over the Sunshine State’s 25 electoral votes — something which may have been foreseen by Gore when he chose Richard J. Daley’s son, William Daley, to be his campaign manager.
The pattern was there. From the hyperactive get-out-the-vote effort launched by the Democratic National Committee and such sympathetic interest groups as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and organized labor, the ward-healing Democrats were well ahead of their more inhibited GOP rivals. With Gore unable to gin up enough energy with his policy lectures and high-spirited, pulpit-pounding pronouncements, the party stepped up its effort to scour every county, district and precinct in search of Gore voters who might be bused, wheeled or carried drooling to the polls. Churches, schools, homeless shelters, mental asylums, nursing homes and even prisons were seen as housing potential voters to do their bit for the veep.
With Florida long-targeted as a battleground state, its elderly population was as vital to the Democratic campaign as it had been in re-electing Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1994. Labor unions offered warehouses to set up phone banks from which calls were made decrying the Texas governor’s alleged plans to turn seniors over to Dr. Jack Kevorkian or take away their bingo cards. In response to this scorched-earth strategy, the Republicans seemed content simply to contain the fires — and, come Election Day, Florida was fully in play.
Seniors were collected by Democratic Party vote wranglers and driven to the polling places as union officials, taking the day off, worked frenetically to ensure their appearance. The black churches collected newly registered faithful in buses and did the same. But therein lay a pitfall of the get-out-the-vote strategy: You can lead a voter to a punchcard (and tell him which hole to punch) but you can’t punch it for him.
As the Florida contest was called, recalled, called again and inspected, the political campaigns concentrated on their postelection strategies. The usual Republican second-guessers were quick to find reporters willing to quote them as flogging the Bush campaign in Florida. Among these, alas, was Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott whose own political wisdom is hardly recommended by the impotence of the GOP strategies during the Senate impeachment trial and the frittering away of Republican advantage in the Senate. Meanwhile, Democrats were moving the battle from the court of public opinion to the courts of Democrat-appointed judges.
Confirming their candidate’s earlier assertion that he would do anything to win the presidency, Gore’s forces started making calls from phone banks around the country to complain of alleged voting irregularities in Florida, particularly in the three Democrat-heavy counties of Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach.
As reported by Ryan Lizza in the pro-Gore New Republic magazine, the Gore staff had been “putting together a team of field operatives and lawyers to fan across Florida in search of voter irregularities” and “sent top recount experts” to Florida to watch what they expected to be a close election. According to Lizza, soon heading the recount charge was Chris Sautter, a Democratic activist who not only authored a 1994 book titled The Recount Primer but was on a plane to Florida the morning after the election to put his words into action for Gore.
Ironically, one of the first races in which Sautter’s strategies for recount counterattack were used was the 1994 Maryland gubernatorial race in which Democrat Parris Glendening fought off a recount challenge from his GOP opponent Ellen Sauerbrey. The Democratic legal eagles who flew in for that one had argued for dismissal of her complaint on the ground that she allegedly had missed the deadline for contesting the qualifications of unqualified voters and disputed absentee ballots.
Glendening’s lawyers maintained that most of the voting irregularities were “a result (at worst) of excusable neglect, or do not involve intentionally wrongful acts or acts of fraud by voters, election officials or others.” Of course, that was then and this is now — and disenfranchised voters, especially those in the sycophantly Democratic counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, should have the right to have their votes (and their dimples) divinely interpreted.
Rather than express concern for the voters who would be “disenfranchised” if their votes were counted improperly, the Glendening team contended “the petitioners have slept on their rights.” In taking the Democratic firemen south for the winter of 2000, their previous arguments for strict adherence to statutory deadlines must have gotten caught in traffic. Standing before the Florida justices on Nov. 20, the Gore team (the best trial lawyers union money could buy) complained that the statutory seven-day recount cutoff was inequitable to large Democratic counties, such as Miami-Dade. If the count doesn’t fit, simply change it.
In grilling the legal team representing Bush and Dick Cheney, the justices asked how it was humanly possible to recount the ballots in seven days. The Bush lawyers countered that larger counties inherently have a larger pool from which to draw volunteers. But any soundness in the Bush argument was lost on the judicial panel, which is well-known for its activism and hostility to Republican anything.
Contending that “the will of the people, not a hyper-technical reliance upon statutory provisions, should be our guiding principle,” the justices wrote they were called on to “fashion a remedy that will allow a fair and expeditious resolution of the questions presented here.” What they fashioned was a Nov. 26 deadline for recounts in the three counties to be concluded and submitted to Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
Seemingly lost in all of their fancy fashioning was that Miami-Dade had only started its manual recount on Nov. 20, meaning that the court’s cutoff date allowed one day less than the statutory provisions had the county acted in a timely fashion. In the wake of the ruling, Miami-Dade officials announced they would be able to complete their recount — in contrast to their prior protestations of undue burden. But this Herculean task, they said, could be handled by only counting ballots on which no presidential candidate had clearly been picked. As options changed by the minute, on Nov. 22 the canvassing board opted not to recount any of the ballots, causing the Gore team to choke on its chads.
For the moment, and as we go to press, the deciding factor is likely to boil down to which ballots in recounting counties are excluded and which are included. While the Gore people had a devil-may-care attitude toward the counting of dimpled ballots, hanging chads and the like, it turned out that the Democrats had a higher standard for those Americans abroad protecting our right to vote.
A five-page memo written by Florida Democratic Party lawyer Mark Herron, titled “Overseas Absentee Ballot Review and Protest,” was circulated as part of a campaign to disenfranchise U.S. service personnel voting from overseas. It included the varying aspects of Florida law governing overseas and military ballots and considerately included a sample copy of a protest form. Vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman and Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey expressed shock and horror that Republicans were pointing to the 1,400 military ballots excluded by this shameful campaign. While divining the rights of chads was all right, Democrats called GOP outrages nothing more than sniping and griping.
But the spin was unspun by public-opinion polls and Florida’s Democratic Attorney General Bob Butterworth soon asked that military servicemen not be punished for matters out of their control, i.e., having no postmarks on their ballots. Butterworth did not use the weight of his office, file an opinion or make any other move to make his “wishes” binding, and the Democratic canvassing boards responded in kind. Whether the military ballots will be counted, whether a simple dimple may be construed as a vote or whether a hanging chad is more embarrassing than a pregnant chad are all matters which, as this is written, we do not know.
What is clear is that when either Al Gore or George W. Bush is sworn in as president he will be hard-pressed to claim a mandate. But as the Chicago Sun-Times editorialized in 1960 following Kennedy’s victory, “A mandate is imposed by the circumstances and challenges of the times we live in for the next president to summon this nation’s utmost efforts.”
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